L.A. Weekly's Scores

Select another publication »
For 3,750 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 46% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 51% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 8.7 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 56
Highest review score: 100 A Bread Factory Part Two: Walk With Me a While
Lowest review score: 0 Deuces Wild
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,540 out of 3750
  2. Mixed: 1,542 out of 3750
  3. Negative: 668 out of 3750
3750 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. Fast Food Nation
    Like two of the year's other standout American films, Kelly Reichardt's "Old Joy" and Ryan Fleck's "Half Nelson," it's a movie of ideas in which the ideas flow effortlessly out of the material instead of being plastered on top with a heavy cement roller (as in "Crash," "Babel" and "Little Children").
  2. AKA
    So never mind the Xmas schlock -- go treat yourself at once to this sensationally entertaining soul food.
  3. The Matrix
    Bill Pope's swooping, noir-inflected cinematography is wonderfully complemented by Owen Paterson's inventive production design, a great soundtrack and the best fight choreography this side of Hong Kong. And even if this isn't "Blade Runner," it is very cool shit.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Hero
    Hero is an epic, evocative of another epoch and of landscapes beyond time. It's overwhelming. And yet I miss the animating anger of Zhang's early masterworks, in which penniless young lovers were oppressed by impotent old men.
  5. Incident at Loch Ness
    Razor sharp and funny as hell, Incident at Loch Ness is the harpoon hurled into the hot-air balloon of “reality” entertainment.
  6. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
    By staying focused on the children -- frightened evacuees from the London Blitz whose parallel war in Narnia both taps into and finally quiets their unspoken terrors -- Adamson keeps faith with the humanity of Lewsis' tale.
  7. Snakes on a Plane
    Snakes was the most exuberantly trashy delight of this summer movie season or last.
  8. Iraq in Fragments
    Seattle filmmaker James Longley's poetic essay on the plight of ordinary Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds trapped in a war simultaneously waged over their heads and in their faces stands head and shoulders above an overcrowded field of documentaries about the Iraq war.
  9. X
    It's all such a spectacular show.
  10. Sugar Town
    Lovely, lovely, lovely.
  11. Kiss of the Spider Woman
    Leonard Schrader adapted the screenplay from the novel by Manuel Puig, and his fearless willingness to explore every corner of human nature serves what is greatest and sweetest in the performances of William Hurt and Raul Julia.
  12. Selena
    For all its simplicity, however, the film is entertaining, even uplifting, with Lopez giving a stellar, confectionary performance.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Inland Empire
    It is Lynch's most experimental endeavor in the 30 years since "Eraserhead," that it will do nothing to draw new fans to the director's work and that, after two viewings, I cannot wait to see it again.
  14. Ballets Russes
    The meat of the film is their wittily edited interviews with company members, now in their 80s and 90s and scattered around the world, many of them still active as teachers and consultants.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Beau Travail
    Leaving the theater, you feel not only as if you've been in a foreign country, but as if you'd gone there inside someone else's skin.
  16. A Star Is Born
    To fall in love with Bradley Cooper’s A Star Is Born is to embrace its paradoxes and, to quote a song Lady Gaga sings in the film, go “off the deep end” and submerge oneself “far from the shallow.” My advice? Submit. Suspend yourself in the charms and romance of this melodrama.
  17. I Remember Me
    Startlingly affecting -- What emerges is a picture of an illness that causes enormous suffering but whose origins and treatment continue to elude even those doctors who pay attention to it.
  18. Triad Election
    Outside of "Grindhouse," it may be the most bang for your buck to be had in a Los Angeles movie theater this season.
  19. Kill Bill: Vol. 2
    Vol. 2 is the most sheerly enjoyable movie I've seen in ages, allowing for all the intimacy that was missing from its predecessor -- this time, the violence feels PERSONAL. Yet this film, too, would be richer if it didn't stand alone, but rather were part of one grand grind-house epic.
  20. Neil Young: Heart of Gold
    Jonathan Demme's superb film of Neil Young's 2005 performance at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium is as fervent a musical homage as was Demme's bubbly tribute to the Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense (1984).
  21. Lumumba
    Genuine thriller -- with one crisis hurtling after another, heightened by hauntingly brief moments of peace.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Sound and Fury
    Perfectly situated in the maelstrom of the personal and the political, Sound and Fury creates a space for serious, obstinate contention.
  23. Little Miss Sunshine
    A raucously entertaining slice of slapstick dressed up as domestic satire.
  24. The Saint
    The Saint works. The reason why it occasionally soars is Kilmer, an actor who’s happiest when burying himself in eccentric characterizations, a trick he performs repeatedly here even as he fills the screen with pure movie-star dazzle.
  25. The Puffy Chair
    The Puffy Chair is the funniest, saddest and most emotionally honest "romantic comedy" to come along in years, even if I've yet to encounter many over the age of about 35 who like the film, or even get it.
  26. Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire
    Though it includes plenty of footage from those terrible days, this wonderful, devastating documentary is as much Dallaire's story as it is the story of a whole continent abandoned by a cynical world.
  27. First Man
    In the end, what shines through First Man is the toughness and resilience of the men whose no-nonsense efforts allowed the rest of us to dream.
  28. The Claim
    A superb film by any measure, as deep and harsh as the sin Dillon committed to become great.
  29. Bad Education
    It's the director's most complexly ordered film to date - a labyrinth of ids, egos and alter egos waiting around blind corners - and may be the movies' most deliriously inventive narrative spiral since "Adaptation."
  30. Tuck Everlasting
    Tuck Everlasting is a wise and beautiful poem to the idea that the fundamental human tragedy is not death, but the unlived life.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »